Word: theaterful
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...first is Schenectady, the working-class city near Albany where Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director, lives with his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and their young daughter Olive (Amy Goldstein). Caden, who's had a critical success staging Death of a Salesman with young actors in the middle-age roles, is himself a premature old man; he hears mortality gargling at him everywhere. In the first scene, he wakes to a radio talk-show report about how the coming of autumn is a harbinger of death; from then on, Caden's life is one long fall. Reading...
...paintings, she tells Caden she'd prefer that he stay home; she'll take Olive with her. Soon, it's clear, mother and child are gone for good. That leaves Caden open to the adoring advances of Hazel (Samantha Morton), who runs the box office at his theater. Her attentions hardly distract Caden from his obsessive suspicions of a physical breakdown: a bathroom accident has left him with a scar on his forehead and the skin disease known as sycosis. Before long, even sympathetic viewers will wonder if Caden is suffering from psychosis...
...masterpiece is the work of a moment, but this theater piece is a long time coming - decades long, as the performers sink into their roles, live in the warehouse, blur the boundary between acting and living. Caden and Hazel are nearing old age by the time a celebrated actress, Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), joins the ensemble, also playing Caden, who is now seen in women's clothes and hair, looking strangely Millicentish. He gives Hazel a doppelganger (Emily Watson), who's also a magnet for his desperate sexual itch. But none of this gets Caden closer to realizing his project...
...infer that Kaufman's mood was no less morose than Caden's. "At times," wrote a reviewer in the Times of London, "it feels more like a suicide note than a movie." (That wouldn't be a first for this author. His 2005 audio play Hope Leaves the Theater ends with the character Charlie Kaufman committing suicide...
...uplifting. Despite appearances, Nadeem is no pessimist. In fact, Selected Plays can be moralistic, even histrionic, with endless interludes of Punjabi folk songs and qawwali choruses. They are not horrors but shock-dramas (one, Burqaganza, was banned last year by Pakistan's Minister of Culture). Ultimately, Nadeem's theater is passionately fired by faith in Pakistan's potential for change and in the sanctity of life. If only those who ram explosives into hotels and busy markets would feel the same...